Photography

09/03/2014

The Wilderness Act, a cornerstone of America’s conservation laws, marks its 50th anniversary on September 3rd. The act established the National Wilderness Preservation System, which represents America’s most wild and pristine federally protected lands. Today, these lands encompass 758 wilderness areas covering more than 109 million acres in 44 states and Puerto Rico.

“Wilderness Forever” is a juried photography competition that celebrates the majesty, diversity and value of the nation’s wilderness areas. More than 5,000 entries were submitted by professional, amateur and youth photographers from across the nation and world. Fifty winning entries are displayed as awe-inspiring large-format prints. The exhibition also features a fossil skull of Bistahieversor sealeyi, a species of tyrannosaur discovered on wilderness lands; interactive touch-screen maps of wilderness created by Esri; and stories that highlight the importance of protecting wilderness.

Below is a small sample of the stunning imagery that is featured in the new exhibition courtesy of Nature's Best Photography. To learn more about the show and to vote on your favorite photos, visit Smithsonian.com. Each month, the public will be able to view all 60 photo finalists and vote to select their favorite as often as once per day for the duration of the exhibition. The photograph with the most votes will be featured as the Photo of the Day and declared the People's Choice winner for that month. Enjoy these images and happy voting!

03/22/2014

Unintended Journeys is a photographic exhibit in collaboration with Magnum Photos on view until August 13, 2014 on the second floor of the National Museum of Natural History. This is the first post in a series exploring the relationship between humans and the environment, and the consequences of human migration and displacement.

This post, and others about the exhibit, are a collaboration between George Washington University students taking Dr. Joshua A. Bell’s seminar Resources, Consumption and the Environment, as well as interns working with Dr. Bell on the exhibit project.

The history of Homo sapiens isdefined by movement and interaction with the environment. For thousands of years humans have individually and collectively travelled around the world searching for better opportunities, searching for natural resources to exploit and as a result of being displaced by natural and human made disasters. These movements and the consumption of resources that they inevitably entail have only increased since European industrialization in the 19th century. With the enormous momentum of current human expansion, researchers are increasingly arguing that we have entered a new geologic time period known as the anthropocene. This new time period is understood as being distinct from the last 12,000 years because of the global environmental changes affected by humans. It is increasingly being argued that human related changes to the Earth’s environment could activate a new type of migration, an exodus from formerly fertile and habitable land found in areas all over the globe.

This image taken by Jonas Bendiksen in the Ganges Delta in Bangladesh in 2009 is a case in point. Wading through knee high floodwaters caused by Cyclone Aila’s destruction of the region’s protective dikes, displaced villages have had to abandon their homes, and at the time of the floods had to carry drinking water to their new homes. At the time this photograph was taken displaced villagers from Dakkhin Jhapa settled in makeshift huts and tents on the regions dikes. While it may be easy for some to dismiss this image as an event that happens elsewhere to other people, the same climatic shifts that have intensified Bangladesh’s monsoon season and have lead to the raising sea levels affecting the area, helped contribute to Hurricane Katrina which devastated the New Orleans and the wider Gulf of Mexico coast.

Bringing these events into a visual dialogue with other natural and environmental disasters, Unintended Journeys explores the relationships humans have to their environments and how individuals, communities, Nation States and international aid organizations responded to these events. The show also asks visitors to think about the role of photography and media in shaping our perceptions of these tragedies.

Unintended Journeys focuses on five natural disasters within the last decade: the impact of Hurricane Katrina (2005), the earthquake in Haiti (2010), the earthquake and resulting tsunami in northern Japan (2011) and the ongoing issues of desertification in northern Kenya and impacts of climatic shifts on Bangladesh. Collectively these events and processes are part of a growing trend of disasters worsened by mounting population pressures, increasing poverty, and shifting climate patterns. The wide range of cultures and environments in the exhibit allow us to think about the global connections that may exist between events separated by space and time. The show utilizes images taken by thirteen photographers of the award-winning Magnum Photos agency, renowned for its 65-year engagement with humanitarian issues.

Collectively the images in this exhibit reveal humanity’s vulnerability to the unpredictable power of nature and the fragility of our relationships with the environment. They also demonstrate humanity’s resilience in the face of calamity. Each section of the exhibit depicts the impact of specific events and the resolutions communities utilized to address and cope with these impacts.

These topics will only become more relevant in the next twenty years and beyond. In 2008, the Norwegian Refugee Council and Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre reported, at least 36 million people were abruptly displaced due to natural disasters. Similarly, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees predicted in 2009 that by mid century there will be between 50 and 200 million people displaced by climate change. The issues posed by rapid and accelerated change are the greatest challenges faced today and for the foreseeable future. Knowledge of our relationship with and impact on the environment is central to resolving the problems arising from these changes.

According to the International Organization for Migration’s 2010 World Migration Report, migration increased from 150 million people in 2000 to 214 million in 2010, and could reach 405 million by 2050. While aggregate numbers of that kind are impactful, it is important to look beyond them into the lived outcomes of migrants’ lives.

Though the events emphasized happened in the last decade, we are aware that natural and environmental disasters continue to affect different parts of the world in recent times as well — such as the Sichuan earthquake in China (2008), Hurricane Sandy in New Jersey (2012), and Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines (2013). We invite you to learn more about environmental events no longer covered by the media but still affecting communities, and to reflect on our relationships with our environment and the impact of disasters on communities worldwide.

We also encourage you to share your stories and experiences of an environmental disaster. If your story is selected, all or a select portion of it will be featured in the exhibit and on the Unintended Journeys website among other publicly submitted stories and images. Please click here for more information and to share your journey with us.

Unintended Journeys Exhibit, second floor, National Museum of Natural History. Photo by Matthew Kennedy, 2014.

11/21/2012

Erin Haney, Research Associate, National Museum of African Art/ Lecturer, George Washington University

At NMNH, don’t miss Sammy Baloji’s exhibition The Beautiful Time, on view until January 7,
2013. The Beautiful Time splices together two visual tracks, and
sets off a powerful and haunting study in reverberation—cutting through space
and across time.

In this image, an archival photograph of a prisoner is placed at the center of the current industrial wasteland. The chain around the man's neck recalls the roping together of prisoners by colonial officers to prevent their escape. Untitled, Sammy Baloji, 2006, Digital C print.

Baloji’s photomontages illuminate monumental stories in an
old mining center in the DRC (Democratic Republic of Congo). Amid slices of
present-day landscape, spectral people interfere: migrant mine workers, Belgian
families, Congolese officials. Within the panorama of photographic past and
presences, Baloji summons the multiple relationships between workers and
colonists, and and the conditions of work in the colonial era. He literally
dredges up images, lost and found, in Katanga.

After seizing power in 1965, President Mobutu Sese Seko often visited industrial sites, attempting to promote what was described as good management and hard work. Such events were the subject of wide coverage by the state-controlled media. This montage is composed of individuals from several archival photograph including Mobutu, television crews, and soldiers. Though it seems to depict Mobutu visiting a mine, Baloji is not re-creating a specific historical event, but rather evoking the era. Sammy Baloji.

The Beautiful Time is
a set of projects to mark the gaping holes between moments in time. Photomontage
offers the vivid mixing—of events and people freely, perhaps in tune with our own
human senses memory and recall. President Mobutu Sese Seko, ruler of what was
then known as Zaire, appears to take a tour of the ruins. Surveyors chart the lost future of the
mining works, and military officials allude to the ties between lucrative
enterprise and state security.

Baloji appropriated archival images, lifted from old
photographs and glass plates that once circulated in Katanga. Placed according
to creative demands and logics, the artist crafted an entirely new set of
heart-grabbing fictional moments. While his camera pans across old warehouses
and smelters, registering the sun’s path, the VIPs are ghosts that we can see
as clear as day.

In the Belgian Congo, Europeans were expected to dress formally for all official occasions, especially if they were to be seen by local inhabitants. Their attire was a sign of belonging to the elite, but was also justified as a means of leading by example. The placement of individuals atop a slag heap in this image evokes the grand life the Europeans were able to enjoy as a result of the mining economy below. Sammy Baloji.

Baloji’s magic links a generation of criticism leveled at
the older generation, with sidelong observation of the institutions and
governments which have failed and jeopardized their citizens. Mining wealth
enriched Europeans and Congolese unequally. Working for the company that itself
was a prime generator of capital was, to be sure, an ambivalent situation,
well-paid and tightly controlled. So, in the face of that well-remembered
golden age and its aftermath, ‘Beautiful Time’ meditates on those ambivalent
absences.

The reverb effect, captured by Baloji and other young
activists and artists working in Africa, drives out those missing things. Using
lost archives and troves of photographs cinematically, they tackle how the past
and present collide. The stories matter, critically. Those old pictures belong
neither wholly to the Congo nor to Belgium, to individuals or a single
community. Lubumbashi-born Baloji plays them back into view, to electrifying,
magnifying playback effect.

04/24/2012

The 2011 Nature's Best Photography Windland Smith Rice International Awards Exhibit opened at the Natural History Museum on March 30, 2012. We all know that photography is a strikingly compelling means of experiencing nature's majesty. This concept is the driving force behind the Nature's Best Photography competition, which operates under the mission to "celebrate the beauty and diversity of nature through the art of photography." The Museums's exhibit features the winners in each award category, as well as a collection of some of the highly honored photographs submitted to the competition this year.

Last month, we featured a post highlighting the Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), a consortium digital library project (of which the Smithsonian is a founding member) providing free access to millions of pages of biodiversity literature. The online library features not only texts but also stunning illustrations of natural history from the past 500 years. Not surprisingly, the species featured in the award-winning photographs from the Nature's Best Exhibit can also be found in the historic books held in the BHL collection. To celebrate the exhibit, we're highlighting some of the featured photographs and sharing more about the species captured in each snapshot through illustrations and scientific descriptions found in the Biodiversity Heritage Library. You can also learn more about the species starring in the exhibit by visiting the Encyclopedia of Life.

Constantine John Phipps, 2nd Baron Mulgrave, was the first to describe the polar bear, which he encountered during his 1773 expedition to the North Pole. He published the account in the 1774 publication A Voyage Towards the North Pole. Just four years later, the first published illustration of the bear was released in Die Säugthiere in Abbildungen nach der Natur (below).

The lion was first described by Carl Linnaeus, a famous Swedish botanist and zoologist who developed the schema of identifying organisms by genus and species names ñ a system known as binomial nomenclature. He is therefore referred to as the Father of Modern Taxonomy. The tenth edition of his revolutionary work, Systema Naturae, represents the birth of zoological nomenclature (using binomial nomenclature for animals). The Lion was scientifically described for the first time in this work.

In 1909, Frank Finn's work Wild Beasts of the World was published, containing 100 reproduced illustrations of nature drawings by Louis Sargent, Cuthbert E. Swan, and Winifred Austin. One of the drawings contained within the first volume was "Lion and Lioness," by Louis Sargent (above).

The Stag Beetle was also first described by Carl Linnaeus in his tenth edition of Systema Naturae. The beetle's common name comes from the resemblance of the speciesí large mandibles to a deer's antlers. Furthermore, male deer use their antlers when battling over territory and mates. The Stag Beetle uses its mandibles for the same purposes.

In 1792, Edward Donovan, an Anglo-Irish writer, illustrator and amateur zoologist, published the first volume of his sixteen volume work entitled The Natural History of British Insects. The series, published over a period of twenty-one years, contained 576 plates, 568 of which were colored. His depiction of the Stag Beetle, wings extended in flight, is particularly memorable (above).

01/13/2012

The Beautiful Time opened on January 7th, in the Focus Gallery of the permanent exhibit, African Voices. It will be on view through 2012.

The archival photographs in this montage were probably taken in the early twentieth century. Porters, carrying loadsof firewood, are dressed in prioson uniforms and are attached to one another by rope. Baloji has placed the prisoners along the tracks of a now useless railway, signaling a loss of potential. Untitled, Sammy Baloji, 2006, Digital C print.

I first saw the Baloji exhibition, which was organized by the Museum for African Art, when it opened in New York over a year ago. I was immediately struck by the beauty and the visual power of the work and by the stories Baloji’s works tell of history and memory, home and landscape, and work and wealth in the Congo. These are all important themes in Africa today and they are themes of so many of the stories from around the continent that are told in African Voices. I was delighted that we were able to bring the exhibit here to NMNH.

Baloji’s haunting photographs evoke the memory of the generations of Congolese whose labor built the vibrant copper mining industry—now lost—in the Katanga province of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Throughout the first half of the twentieth century these mines were the second largest producers of copper in the world.

Baloji’s photographic collages juxtapose black and white archival photographs of Congolese mine workers against the background of color photographs of panoramic landscapes of the contemporary ruins of factories and copper mines. Although the early workers—who wear prison garb and in chains in some of these photographs—came to the mines as forced labor for the colonial state, they had within a few decades become highly skilled and valued mine workers. Their labor created Congo’s modern industrial era and in his artwork, Baloji’s celebrates these mine workers’ essential role in Congo’s prosperity. At the same time that they celebrate this history, these photographs convey the dramatic power of tragedy—the loss of the hard earned prosperity that has been squandered over the past decades through mismanagement and corruption.

Baloji is part of a generation of young Congolese who were born nearly two decades after the end of the colonial era in 1960. His work aims to understand and reconnect for contemporary Congolese and for us two strikingly different time periods –the colonial and the post colonial era. His photographs give voice to those forgotten African workers who built Congo’s mining industry in the early part of the 20th century, and they cry out against the recent deindustrialization in the Congo and elsewhere in Africa.

Last year, I had the opportunity to meet Sammy and his colleague Patrick Mudekereza, in Brussels. Patrick is a writer and a long time artistic collaborator with Baloji in the Congo. I asked Patrick to share his thoughts on these photographs and we have included his commentary in the exhibit. Asked about the meaning of the phrase, The Beautiful Time, Patrick explained, “Sammy’s photographs are not nostalgic celebrations of The Beautiful Time, a phrase we often hear the older generation use when referring to the golden age of the colonial mining industry. Rather, Sammy’s pictures speak to today and imply a failure by our leaders to provide our people with a means to create a more beautiful time than before.”

08/10/2010

Developing an exhibition is the process of winnowing content down to the essentials – deciding what absolutely cannot be left on the cutting room floor. Space is limited, so the exhibit team is constantly sifting through stories, asking which photographs and objects are most essential. All of the content seems important at first blush. In a photographic exhibit, each photograph must tell a story. Deciding what stays and what goes can be challenging. I was thinking about this recently as I began archiving the 100th Anniversary exhibition photographs. One photograph that survived the refining process stood out as capturing many facets of the Museum’s story in a single frame.

When you go to work for a place like the National Museum of Natural History, you expect to work with scientists – curators specifically. I think most people would be surprised to learn that curators have long comprised a very small segment of the people doing science at the Museum. For decades many of our scientific staff were not even scientists by training, but rather started out as “tinkerers” who became scientists by trade through the experiences available to them at the Museum. I also realized that many different types of “science” happen here every day – from molecular DNA barcoding to the conservation and preservation of mammal specimens and pottery. In museums, science also intersects art when we exhibit our collections and research. Museum staff members from varied backgrounds and professions work quietly behind the scenes and out of the spotlight, forging new areas of expertise, new professions, and expanding the boundaries of what we call science.

This photograph of Museum taxidermists Julian S. Warmbath, Charles R. Aschemeier, Watson M. Perrygo, and William L. Brown mounting a hippopotamus for exhibition in the 1930s captures the story of nontraditional science at the Museum and publicly recognizes many of the nontraditional scientists and science at the Museum (Image from Smithsonian Institution Archives). In many ways, the National Museum of Natural History is the home of the taxidermist, and most of the premiere taxidermists in the United States worked at or for the Museum at one time or another. Most of these scientific professionals were not scientists by training. Often they started out like Perrygo – a “tinkerer” who looked closely at the world around him, asked questions, participated in field expeditions, and explored the natural world whenever possible. In this photograph, I see four men who did not have PhDs in science but cared for scientific specimens daily and revolutionized a profession along the way. They did this behind the scenes in the work rooms, labs, and basements, wearing smocks and using the tools of their trade – many of which they invented or were even hazardous to their health – and are only recognized decades later through the inclusion of this photograph in the exhibition.

Professionals like these have been defining and redefining what it means to be a scientist for over one hundred years. Each man is examining a different part of the hippo specimen as they measure and prep it for display. The daily care and display of museum collections requires intense attention to the smallest details. They’ve mounted the hippo with the mouth open dramatically. Most of museum visitors will never have the opportunity to see a hippopotamus, much less look into its outstretched mouth. Taxidermists balance preservation of the specimen with the need for displays that will intrigue and incite visitors’ imaginations and their interest in science. Working in a place that is home to such diverse and dedicated scientific professionals is a unique experience and makes coming to work every day a pleasure.

Seeing this photograph again also reminded me that the Museum’s most recent expert in taxidermy and bronze sculptor in his spare time, Paul Rhymer, retired this spring leaving the Office of Exhibits without a resident taxidermist. Before he left the Museum, Paul told me that he did an assessment and treatment on this hippopotamus specimen when it was put back on display in the 1990s. Because of the care and scientific expertise employed in the conservation and treatment by taxidermists Warmbath, Aschemeier, Perrygo, and Brown in the 1930s, Paul said that the hippo was the best preserved specimen he had ever seen and required little treatment despite being almost one hundred years old. You can still see this hippo on display today in the Museum’s Behring Family Hall of Mammals.

06/22/2010

Recently, we lost a longtime colleague and friend - photographer Roy 'Chip' Clark. This interview is one of his last and showcases the passion for his job that made Chip a valued member of our community. Read about his nearly 40-year career at NMNH.